Internet privacy and 'having nothing to hide'
This is my blogpost trade with Kami. (It's such a fun idea and I'm always up for stuff like this.) The title was Internet privacy and 'having nothing to hide'.
I've read several of Kami's posts and I'm trying to work out what her take would be. Was it going to be about programming? As in, privacy in the sense of our corporate overlords sucking us dry of data. But the 'having nothing to hide' sounds more personal.
I exist on the web as my government name, as a pseudonymous fan, as a D&D player, and various other people. None of it is awful. Various people know various amounts of it and a few people know all of it. If it all got connected together and posted in a binder to people I might squirm a little but no harm would come of it. There's nothing 'to hide' in that sense, but I hide it anyway.
The internet has a grand tradition of anonymity. Being continued on the indie web. I feel weird about using a full name here on the blog - it makes it look like I want things to be way more professional than I do. But my handles are either too juvenile, chosen back in the late 90s, or too obviously connected to my fannish identity. My fannish identity even has various levels of accounts and alts to separate things.
There are things we all hide. Be that our real names for security or our normal human faces behind filters on social media for insecurity. I wrote a whole defence of fanfiction and did not disclose any of my fanfiction. Yeah I hid it. I'm not ashamed of it but it's a different part of me. Just like I don't put my name and address at the top of my fics.
Maintaining one's privacy on the internet can be for all sorts of reasons. It's not a problem as long as it's not being done for evil, like harassing people. It can be liberating, it's certainly safer, it's fun, it's just tidiness and compartmentalising. And why not.